The Falkland Islands need crumpets

The Argentinian industry minister called for an unofficial boycott of British products on Tuesday, urging shops to replace British products with those from countries that recognize the Falkland Islands as belonging to Argentina. But the UK is only willing to start talks about the sovereignty of the Islands if at least 3,000 residents demand it [that, by the way, is essentially everyone who lives there and so far they don’t seem to care]. read article

Transparency International released the world corruption index yesterday. Greece, the country of honest, hard-working, tax-paying people, who got screwed by 1%ers and banks (no, wait…) came in on rank 80. EIGHTY! Making it the second most corrupt country in the EU after Bulgaria. According to an EU corruption survey, 88% of Greeks think that corruptionis part of Greek business culture. To make this grim subject more fun, Transparency International put all the data in pretty interactive charts. view charts

Otherwise, North Korea agreed to stop its nuclear program, James Murdoch said he would step down as CEO of News International and the European Central Bank pumped more than half a trillion euros (€529.5bn) into the economy.

Oh right, and Peter Orszag, of the Council on Foreign Relations and Citigroup, has yet another idea to combat the Greek deficit: taxing smokers. Apparently, 40% of the population in Greece smoke, which is almost double of the OECD average (22%). One reason are the low tobacco prices (less than half of the UK), so why not tax the shit out of it? No deficit, no smokers, no austerity… great plan. read article

Planet Money’s Adam Davidson wrote something like a short history of the City of London in his NYTimes column, it’s a nice read: read article